Beatles tourism gets a boost from Calgarian

Lisa Monforton, Calgary Herald11.13.2009

Indra was the first club the Beatles played at in Hamburg. At the time they were the band nobody wanted and we're given this gig at the Indra because there were no other bands available. The line up at this time was John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best.

Beatles fans everywhere were stoked last week when the long-awaited release of The Beatles’ 12 digitally remastered studio albums and the video game version of Rock Band hit the stores. But the ultimate in Beatlemania is visiting the city where the Fab Four got their chops and began their decade-long ascension to near messianic musical heights.

For a huge Beatles buff like Calgary’s David

Hanowski, Hamburg,

Germany — not Liverpool, England — is the birthplace of the Beatle

phenomenon.

In the summer of 2008, Hanowski’s passion took him on a trip to Hamburg and the eventual creation of a Beatles tour business. As he did his online research, he was surprised to discover there wasn’t a lot in the way of Beatles tourism in the city of

1.7 million where the band’s fame and legendary status solidified.

“I’m a Beatles fan . . . there has to be more,” the computer software entrepreneur and part-time musician, remembers thinking.

“I was surprised there wasn’t a lot of promotion.”

He knew the band had played four clubs there, lived in the back of a decrepit theatre and in their off-hours drank at a cafe called Gretel & Alfons. All of those places are still there, says Hanowski, and looking much like they did nearly 50 years ago.

On the trip, he met some locals who were around when the Beatles were a fivesome (including Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best).

Together, he and another man,

Peter Paetzold, collaborated to come up with what they call an authentic walking tour for fans — Beatles in Hamburg. What sets the tour apart from the others is that it includes special guest appearances by people who hung out or interacted with the Beatles in those early days.

That includes one of Hanowski’s partners, Paetzold, who lived

20 metres away from the theatre the Beatles lived in while playing their gigs in Hamburg.

“There are many stories about John Lennon in Hamburg and I think they are all true. John was the original punk,” Paetzold says in an email from Hamburg. And most of those stories, he adds, are too raunchy to print in a newspaper.

Hamburg was where the group toiled — seven days a week with hour-long sets, few breaks and little pay — in the early ’60s.

George Harrison called their time in the city the band’s “apprenticeship.” Lennon remembered it as the place where The Beatles matured, honed their musical talents, sampled their first taste of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll and even adopted their look, right down to the mop top haircuts.

“I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg,” Lennon later said.

In 1960, Paetzold says, before their manager Brian Epstein discovered them in 1962 and polished their look and sound, they were “very rough diamonds, and would be similar to a punk band today.”

Little did the band or anyone involved in the local music scene at the time predict that by 1964 they’d be making their first trip to adoring throngs in the United States.

Back in Hamburg, it was anything but glamorous gigs and swooning teenage girls. Hamburg was a gritty city where British and American sailors came for shore leave looking for prostitutes and live music. They poured into the bars of the seedy

St. Pauli district, including places like the Indra and the Kaiserkeller, owned by a local entrepreneur named Bruno Koschmider.

That’s where The Beatles first came as a filler live act because many of the more well-known bands were booked at a music festival in the U.K. in August 1960.

Hanowski says while Koschmider was looking for bands in Liverpool to play at his club in Hamburg, he was told about a group: “They’re not very good, but the girls like them.”

So he hired the Beatles and by some accounts took advantage of them.

Eventually the band broke its contract with Koschmider to play at the much larger and better paying Top Ten club and the Star Club, which eventually burned down.

“When you go there and see the proximity of these clubs, where bands are still playing there today . . . it’s like a cauldron of creativity. That was the breeding ground of The Beatles,” says Hanowski. “It’s almost like a little time capsule there.”

Hanowski says the Beatles’ Hamburg chapter is only recently starting to emerge as a tourist activity, including the opening of a five-storey Beatles museum in May. Hanowski likes to think that his inquiries and subsequent tour had something to do with the interest.

It hasn’t hurt either that with the remastered CD release and the video game — which will likely introduce a whole new generation to The Beatles — is creating another wave of Beatlemania. It might also be why Hanowski’s starting to see big tour groups interested in his tour.

He admits people might not make the pilgrimage to Hamburg, but if you happen to be in Germany, “it’s a definite must-see” for devoted Beatles followers.

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